The topic of similarities and possible commonalities between Hippocratic and Babylonian medicine continues to attract comment and debate, which the present seminar will address. The discussion will involve comparisons of both the content and form of Hippocratic treatises with contemporary Babylonian medical tablets, to argue for a more global view of ancient medicine in the Mediterranean and ancient Near East in the time of Hippocrates and his followers.

Japan’s suicide phenomenon has fascinated both the media and academics, although many questions and paradoxes embedded in the debate on suicide have remained unaddressed in the existing literature, including the assumption that Japan is a "Suicide Nation". This tendency causes common misconceptions about the suicide phenomenon and its features.

Aiming to redress the situation, this book explores how the idea of suicide in Japan was shaped, reinterpreted and reinvented from the 1900s to the 1980s. Providing a timely contribution to the underexplored history of suicide, it also adds to the current heated debates on the contemporary way we organize our thoughts on life and death, health and wealth, on the value of the individual, and on gender. The book explores the genealogy and development of modern suicide in Japan by examining the ways in which beliefs about the nation’s character, historical views of suicide, and the cultural legitimation of voluntary death acted to influence even the scientific conceptualization of suicide in Japan. It thus unveils the way in which the language on suicide was transformed throughout the century according to the fluctuating relationship between suicide and the discourse on national identity, and pathological and cultural narratives. In doing so, it proposes a new path to understanding the norms and mechanisms of the process of the conceptualization of suicide itself.

Filling in a critical gap in three particular fields of historical study: the history of suicide, the history of death, and the cultural history of twentieth century Japan, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Japanese History.

Death of the king: smallpox vaccination and diplomacy in Nepal in 1816

Dr. Susan Heydon (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Research masterclass

March 9th 2016,

The Department of History and the Centre for Global Health Histories

Berrick Saul Building BS/120

University of York

In November 1816 the King of Nepal died from smallpox during an epidemic. Following defeat in the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-16) the government of Nepal was obliged to agree to the presence of a permanent British representative. This was unpopular. While the king’s death is widely known, it is not mentioned in any account that in the months leading up to the young king’s death the recently established British Residency staff obtained a vaccine from India and offered vaccination to the government and people of Nepal – a move that was also a diplomatic strategy towards establishing better relations between Nepal and British India. The events and wider context in 1816 tell us not only about the early nineteenth century but remained relevant 150 years later during the global smallpox eradication programme.

The history of medicine is a vast subject, encompassing the whole of humanity in every region of the globe. For millennia, our ancestors have sought to combat disease, relieve pain and postpone the Grim Reaper’s inevitable victory, doing so with a fortitude and humour that makes their experiences resonate with us today. In this book packed full of facts from medicine’s long and often shocking past, Caroline Rance gives concise introductions to some of the more well-known (and not-so-well-known) episodes, dispelling a few myths and celebrating a few neglected figures along the way.

Accounting is about how much. Healthcare today seems caught between too much and not enough. On the one hand, there are swollen national health budgets, massive hospital and medical technology costs, big pharma, and an ever-growing market of medical products and services; on the other hand, lack of access to healthcare can be found across the globe, as can political challenges of resource allocation, ethical dilemmas of “rationing,” and the search for solutions of cost reduction, more equal distribution, and efficiency between the poles of government regulation and market principles. Critics argue that “economization” of medicine limits the growth of medical knowledge and its benefits.

It is hardly noticed in current debates that some version of these patterns and problems of economy has been with health and medicine for centuries – not only in the modern sense of economic efficiency, but also in a traditional sense of good medical practice. Moreover, the perceived patterns, problems, and solutions have all been enabled by various forms of accounting – in the narrower sense of bookkeeping methods and in the broader sense of economic, political, and moral monitoring, calculating, and decision-making. And these, in turn, appear to have shaped medical knowledge and practice in ways too little understood. We invite scholars from a wide variety of relevant fields to join a working group to examine this longue durée of medicine and economy, focusing on practices and values of economic and medical knowing.

With this focus, the group will bring together related perspectives and lines of research that have been surprisingly disconnected hitherto: historical and social study of health economics, markets, and regulation or “economization”; history and sociology of accounting, including work specifically on hospital accounting; study of the rise of political arithmetic and vital statistics; of quantification in clinical medicine as well as in public health and epidemiology; of risk calculation and insurance. All of these will be brought together more broadly with historical and social studies of information, data, and paper technology.

Questions to be addressed include: What variety of roles have accounting and similar economic practices played in everyday medical knowing? In knowing what to do in health care institutions? Since when and why? How do such practices generate information about medical costs and in what ways are such data transformed into economic knowledge? How has this economic practice and knowledge affected medical knowledge and practice, whether in diagnosis and disease classification, or human and animal physiology and its “applied” fields and uses, the conceptual and economic organization of medical research, the nature of prognosis and treatment, patients’ self-observation and self-medication, and so on? Or looking beyond such effects, have medical and economic knowing been more deeply integral to each other and, if so, exactly how? Under what conditions have these relationships and processes become visible and contested or consciously shaped by actors for specific ends? What changes can be observed over time, and what differences across countries or political and economic systems?

Accounting happened on paper, at least in the period of proposed study. It involved not only specific methods of counting and numerical calculation, but also wider practices of information and data, including note-taking and the keeping, organizing, and using of notebooks, files, and archives, reading and writing, tabularization and transfer among different kinds of tabular and narrative representation. Practices of data, writing, and information have become the subject of increasingly intensive historical and social research over the past 10 years. These are not the subject per se of the proposed working group, but they are its material focus. More concretely, in the sphere of accounting, information practices produce cost calculations for medical treatments (and indeed the very definition of units of medical care), tables of figures about the patient, construction of vital and medical statistics, the accounting of charges for insurance companies and their setting of rates, and classification of information and data about patients.

Proposals for participation in the working group will therefore ideally specify the sorts of material to be studied: from practitioner notebooks to hospital ledgers; from files and tables to budgets, but also reports, charts, publications, records of meetings and debates. Research questions will go beyond revealing forms and practices to address what has been at stake in them. Accounting looks both backward and forward in time, comprising both accountability and projection or forecasting; it puts a variety of values and expectations on paper in ways that operate immediately and long-term on disease and survival, always through the knowing that happens around these. Accounting and related practices thus shape what medicine is and, for actors in given times and places, ought to be.

The working group will convene three times in 2016–17 in Berlin with the purpose of producing a truly collective volume. The contributions will be discussed at the workshops, with feedback from participants and invited commentators. The working group is an initiative of the research project “Ways of Writing: How Physicians Know, 1550–1950,” funded by the ERC (for further information about the project see: http://papertechnology.org). This will be the third working group of the ERC project using this mode of collaborative work.

Meetings will take place in June (17th–19th) 2016, in December (2nd–4th) 2016 and in late Spring 2017. Travel and accommodation will be reimbursed.

The First World War was the first 'total war'. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Many more suffered terrible, life-threatening injuries: wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus, exposure to extremes of temperature, emotional trauma and systemic disease. In an effort to alleviate this suffering, tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Of these, some were experienced professionals, while others had undergone only minimal training. But regardless of their preparation, they would all gain a unique understanding of the conditions of industrial warfare. Until recently their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare, have remained largely hidden from view. By combining biographical research with textual analysis, Nurse writers of the great war opens a window onto their insights into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare.

The Bloody Fields of Waterloo: Medical Support for Wellington’s Greatest Victory

Mr Michael Crumplin (Royal College of Surgeons of England)

Edinburgh History of Medicine Group
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM (GMT)

Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh,
Nicholson Street,
Edinburgh
EH8 9DW

This talk will explore the various stages of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), highlighting particular medical issues of the campaign. The Army Medical Department was ill-prepared. Over the long Peninsular War (1808-14), it had been honed into an efficient force by Sir James McGrigor and his ‘Medical Gentlemen’, as Wellington called them. However, many of these surgeons had since dispersed and were worn out. The Scots’ input to the war, injuries sustained, and aspects of wounds and surgical treatment will be addressed, including the challenges for surgeons working without antisepsis, anaesthesia, nursing and the modern understanding of physiological trauma that we possess today.

Accidents are challenges to the structures of modern societies in the twentieth century. They expose structural weaknesses and often give rise to new developments and legal and social innovations that aim at preventing accidents or diminishing their impact. The consequences of accidents are enormous: they often lead to a huge death toll and vast economic costs and they disturb economic and social processes. In the workshop on ‘Accidents and the role of the state’ we want to discuss, from a historical perspective, the changing relationship between accidents and the modern state during the 20th century. We are, for instance, interested in the following questions:

1. Accidents, legitimacy and the various expectations towards the state: How are accidents debated in a political context? Do accidents affect the legitimacy of the modern state? How are different responses by different states to accidents linked to particular expectations towards the role and the task of state?

2. Risks, citizenship and notions of social justice: How do social structures and notions of social justice relate to the response of the state to accidents? How are, on the other hand, notions of social justice influenced by accidents and emergencies? What is the role of varying concepts of citizenship for the perception of accidents and the development of responses to them?

3. The build-up of a regulative framework in response to accidents: What kind of legal, organisational and regulative solutions did the modern state develop as a response to accidents? How effective were the attempts by the state to regulate individual behaviour that was deemed to be dangerous and risky?

4. The state and the emergence of a modern error culture: How does the reception of errors that can lead to accidents evolve over the 20th century? How is the relationship between acceptance and disciplining of citizens? Which role does the state and its institutions play for learning processes? Does the public perception of individual and structural errors change during the 20th century?

5. Accidents, medicine and technical innovation: Which role do accidents play for the development of medical and technical innovations? How do different states promote or discourage the development of different cultures of medicine and technology?

One of the working assumptions of the workshop is that the analysis of the impact of and reactions to accidents and emergencies enables conclusions about both the resilience of modern societies and about different strategies to achieve resilience. The debates about how to achieve resilience are linked to conceptions of statehood and citizenship.

The workshop takes place in the context of a USIAS-FRIAS joint research project on military accidents in France and Germany in the twentieth century. We are therefore especially interested in proposals that deal with the role of the military. However, relevant topics for the workshop could, of course, also come from the realm of the histories of technology, of environment, of medicine, or of the rise of the modern state. We are interested both in presentations of case studies as well as in more conceptual approaches on the topic.

Contributions that deal with accidents in German and French history are highly welcome.

However, the call is by no means limited to historians of France or Germany.

Please send your proposals including a short abstract of approximately 200 words for the workshop and brief biographical details (affiliation, main areas of research and relevant publications) until 1. March 2016 to the following addresses:

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

dimanche 21 février 2016

Therapoetics after Actium: Narrative, Medicine, and Authority in Augustan Epic

Julia Nelson Hawkins

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (January 22, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-13: 978-1421417301

Inspired by classical and Hellenistic "miracles" of medical science, Augustan poets dramatically reshaped the Roman epic by infusing it with medical metaphors and themes. In Therapoetics after Actium, Julia Nelson Hawkins argues that this shift constitutes a veritable Roman "therapoetics." By incorporating medical narratives into verse, these poems essentially position the poet as a healer and his poetry as healthy.

Hawkins explores why so many prominent scenes of plague, healing, and the body persist in the epics of the period, especially in the final books of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Diverging from the standard interpretation of medical topoi in Greek and Roman literature as an opportunity for the author to either vaunt his erudition or explore the psychology of suffering, Hawkins focuses instead on the proliferation of early medical texts. She explains how the Alexandrian writings of Herophilus and Erasistratus, which submitted Hippocratic theories to the rigors of experiment, fundamentally transformed medical analogies in poetry.

Poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus harnessed medical ideas and language to highlight their modernity and to show the Ptolemies that poets were indispensable to a healthy kingdom. By investigating medical metaphors and narratives within the political and literary milieu of two of the biggest scientific and governmental revolutions in European history, Therapoetics after Actium not only expands our knowledge of the relationship between medicine and culture, but also offers an argument for why medicine still needs the humanities.

In the sixteenth century medicinal plants, which until then had been the monopoly of apothecaries, became a major topic of investigation in the medical faculties of Italian universities, where they were observed, transplanted, and grown by learned physicians both in the wild and in the newly founded botanical gardens. Tuscany was one of the main European centres in this new field of inquiry, thanks largely to the Medici Grand Dukes, who patronised and sustained research and teaching, whilst also taking a significant personal interest in plants and medicine. This is the first major reconstruction of this new world of plants in sixteenth-century Tuscany. Focusing primarily on the medical use of plants, this book also shows how plants, while maintaining their importance in therapy, began to be considered and studied for themselves, and how this new understanding prepared the groundwork for the science of botany. More broadly this study explores how the New World's flora impacted on existing botanical knowledge and how this led to the first attempts at taxonomy.

From Manchester to Melborne, from Auckland to Aberystwyth, from Detroit to Dartmouth, doctors from the Indian Subcontinent dispersed throughout the Western World in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. To date, the demographic phenomenon of Indian- and other foreign-trained doctors has largely resided on the fringes of ‘national’ histories of twentieth-century health services. Adopting a global health history perspective, this lecture examines the post-war Indian medical diaspora, exploring the contemporary impact and historical legacy of this remarkable circulation of health care practitioners.

Neurological history claims its earliest origins in the 17th century with Thomas Willis's publication of Anatomy of the Brain, coming fully into fruition as a field in the late 1850s as medical technology and advancements allowed for in depth study of the brain. However, many of the foundations in neurology can find the seed of their beginning to a time much earlier than that, to ancient Greece in fact. Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine is a collection of essays exploring neurological ideas between the Archaic and Hellenistic eras. These essays also provide historic, intellectual, and cultural context to ancient Greek medical practice and emphasizing the interest in the brain of the early physicians. This book describes source material that is over 2,500 years old and reveals the observational skills of ancient physicians. It provides complete translations of two historic Hippocratic texts: On the Sacred Diseases and On the Wounds of the Head. The book also discusses the Hippocratic Oath and the modern applications of its meaning. Dr. Walshe connects this ancient history, usually buried in medical histories, and shows the ancient Greek notions that are the precursors of our understanding of the brain and nervous system.

jeudi 18 février 2016

In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and the author of the prizewinning A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo, also published by Duke University Press.

Studies about science and technology have been captivating historiographic interest in Ibero-America. A series of important work has recently appeared related to the history of medicine, expeditions, cartography, information technology, the development of aeronautics and energy in addition to other fields which link technology and progress in Ibero-America.

As a way to spur this emerging historiographic trend Hib, Revista de Historia Iberoamericana, will dedicate a special dossier to this topic accepting new approaches and perspectives on this theme, especially from young scholars.

This dossier looks to expand the analysis and publish work that, for example: contributes to the understanding regarding the adaptation processes of scientific and technological knowledge originating inside and outside of Ibero-America; the use and impact of this knowledge on the region; the symbolic character and the cultural imaginaries associated with science and technology; the circulation of scientists and technicians; the creation and patenting processes of new inventions; the link between the scientific and the technological and the nation building and state strengthening processes; or concerning the relation between science and technology with power, public policies and social and economic development.

The possibilities that this dossier brings are ample and look to transform this special issue, which will be published in June 2016 and serve as a point of reference for all scholars interested in the topic of science and technology in Ibero-America.

It should be noted that the dossier does not have any type of thematic emphasis or is restricted to a particular time period; consequently the journal will receive work related to Ibero-America regardless of the time period it addresses.

For those interested in sending articles the deadline for submission is March 4, 2016. Articles should be sent to the journal’s editorial assistant Luz María Díaz de Valdés, at luzmaval@hib.universia.net.

This is the first book devoted to the cultural history in the pre-modern period of people we now describe as having learning disabilities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, including historical semantics, medicine, natural philosophy and law, Irina Metzler considers a neglected field of social and medical history and makes an original contribution to the problem of a shifting concept such as 'idiocy'.

Emphasising the issues with imposing modern definitions of what has variously been called cognitive, intellectual or mental disability onto the past, this book analyses a wide range of medieval and modern material. In order to explore how the names and words used to describe people also influenced their social and cultural treatment, this book looks at what the medieval equivalents to our modern scientific or psychiatric experts had to say about intellectual disability, and by uncovering how medieval normative texts shaped ideas of idiocy and folly, this study reconstructs what the legal and social implications of such concepts were. The book demolishes a number of historiographic myths and stereotypes surrounding intellectual disability in the Middle Ages and suggests new insights with regard to 'fools', jesters and 'idiots'.

Fools and idiots?: Intellectual disability in the Middle Ages will be required reading for anyone studying or working in disability studies, history of medicine, social history and the history of ideas.

The third seminar of the Spring Term will take place in WF38 on the first floor of the Medical School at 5.30pm

Thursday 18th February

College of Medical and Dental Sciences
Institute of Applied Health Research

This paper concentrates on hospital provision in inter-war Ireland. It compares patient fee-payment in voluntary and local authority hospitals in the two states on the newly partitioned island: Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Developing on Paul Bridgen’s work on the importance of middle-class support for the introduction of the National Health Service in Britain, the paper argues that the nature of patient fee-payment in the two Irish states is central to understanding the long-term development of each country’s health system. Cross-class support for universal health in Northern Ireland, based on increased financial demands placed on both the working and middle classes for hospital care, eased the eventual introduction of the NHS in the region. Contrastingly, in independent Ireland universal health care was never introduced. Traditional historiographical interpretations have viewed opposition from the medical profession and religious authorities, combined with a lack of political support, as the major factors that prevented the introduction of a NHS-type system in independent Ireland. This paper, however, argues that independent Ireland’s strongly developed private hospital sector, which substantially contrasted with Northern Ireland’s experience, led to less support from the middle classes for universalism. Overall, this paper contributes to wider debates about comparative welfare states, especially demonstrating that Peter Baldwin’s thesis, which argues that cross-class interests were central to the success or failure of universalist systems, is demonstrated in the differing experiences on both sides of the Irish border

After more than two years of development the Biographische Archiv der Psychiatrie (Biographical Archive of Psychiatry - BIAPSY) is online and recently updated. An initial compilation of 130 biographical entries featuring influential individuals from the history of psychiatry is now available at www.biapsy.de. The innovative online archive was developed at the Hochschule Niederrhein under the supervision of Professor Dr. Burkhart Brückner of the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences. The project was made possible by a funding programme for the humanities and social sciences offered by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

On the one hand the online archive features famous individuals from the world of science, on the other it also includes patients and members of their families. "In accordance with the principle of a ‘history from below’, we are also documenting the viewpoints of patients with psychiatric experiences. "We therefore combine the historiography of the psychiatric profession with patient-centred historiography," Brückner comments, describing the participatory approach of his team.

Which role do the patients play in the history of psychiatry? Which famous individuals were the most influential? Why does a person become a psychiatrist or psychotherapist? These are typical questions that were at the centre of focus during compilation of the short biographies. "We seek to address these questions in their respective socio-historical contexts," Brückner reports. "Particular attention was paid to ensuring scientific quality. Our sources and texts comply with the medical historical standards," he continues.

The earliest entry in the online archive presents the Late Medieval English mystic Margery Kempe. However, the emphasis is on individuals from the 19th and 20th centuries. Another criterion: Only individuals who have been deceased for at least two years are included. So far, around 40 percent of the existing biographies have also been translated into English.

The most famous people featured in the archive include Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, Karl Jaspers, Carl Rogers and Emil Kraepelin. The patients’ perspective is documented in articles such as those on the 17th-century Englishman James Carcasse, the 19th-century German author Friedrich Krauß or Anna Pauline Bleuler, the sister of the Swiss physician Eugen Bleuler (who coined the term "schizophrenia" in 1911 and was both a professional and a relative). Brückner also cites the Italian Adalgisa

Conti: "From 1914 onwards, she spent a total of 65 years at an asylum in Arezzo; her fate is a typical example of the conditions in such institutions until the reforms of the 1970s."

There are plans to extend the archive in the future. "BIAPSY is open for suggestions and other contributions. The project is now off the ground and everyone who feels competent can submit a suitable biography. We will then review the texts and ensure that they meet certain quality standards, after which they will be made available online," explains Brückner." We may also be looking for private donations or applying for new research funding that will allow us to extend the Biographical Archive of Psychiatry," Professor Brückner continues.

Contagionism is an old idea, but gained new life in Restoration Britain. Germ of an Idea considers British contagionism in its religious, social, political and professional context from the Great Plague of London to the adoption of smallpox inoculation. It shows how ideas about contagion changed medicine and the understanding of acute diseases.

The Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine will provide one $5000 grant to support travel, lodging, and incidental expenses for a flexible research period between July 1st 2016 – June 30th 2017. Foundation Fellowships are offered for research related to the history of women to be conducted at the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Preference will be given to projects that specifically address women physicians, scientists, or other health workers, but proposals on the history of women’s health issues may also be considered. The fellowship proposal should demonstrate that the Countway Library has resources central to the research topic.

Applicants should submit a proposal (no more than five pages) outlining the proposed project, its subject and objectives, length of residence, historical materials to be consulted, and a project budget with specific information on travel, lodging, and research expenses), along with a curriculum vitae and two letters of recommendation by March 15th, 2016.

Besides conducting research, the fellow will submit a report on the results of his/her residency and will be asked to present a seminar or lecture at the Countway Library.

Applications should be sent to: Women in Medicine Fellowships, Archives for Women in Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 10 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115. Electronic submissions of applications and supporting materials and any questions may be directed to chm@hms.harvard.edu. The fellowship appointment will be announced in May 2016.

dimanche 14 février 2016

The Centre for the History of Medicine (part of the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow University) and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow invite you to a series of free seminars on medical history, medical humanities and related topics – Hope you can join us!

Tuesday, 15 March 2016Microbes to Matrons: aspects of infection control in Scottish hospitals c. 1870-1940
Professor Marguerite Dupree, University of Glasgow

Tuesday, 19 April 2016Scotland, tropical medicine, and the making of dengue fever in East Asia
Maurits Meerwijk, University of Hong Kong

Meetings take place at 5:30pm in the library at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (tea and coffee from 5pm). It’s free to attend but please book (library@rcpsg.ac.uk or call 0141 227 3234).

Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.